Five Famous Paintings With Hidden Meanings you must know

Famous works of art are not just nice to look at - some hold hidden meanings that were deliberately painted in by the artist.

Only last week experts claimed that Michelangelo’s fresco, that covers the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Vatican City, concealed symbols for the female anatomy in an early example of feminism.

Major novels and blockbuster Hollywood films have explored some other secrets that the most recognisable paintings hide in plain sight.

Here are five of the most famous paintings in the world - and the hidden meanings cleverly worked into them…

The Mona Lisa - hides hidden letters, mathematical perfection and a pregnancy?

Perhaps the single most recognisable works EVER, Leonardo da Vinci’s 16th Century painting the Mona Lisa has been studied for centuries for hidden codes. The look on the face of the Mona Lisa - rumoured to be Lisa del Giocondo, the wife of a Florentine gentleman - is mystery enough, as no one quite seems to know what emotion she is displaying. But other secrets may be more obvious. For starters, the Mona Lisa pose, with her hands caressing her belly suggest that she was pregnant at the time of the painting.

The face also fits perfectly inside the ‘golden ratio’ (see above) - a number in mathematics that has been used in countless examples of art and architecture - including the Pyramids of Giza. Use of the golden ration is meant to produce a sense of beauty and balance - and the Mona Lisa face fits perfectly into a golden rectangle. Indeed, da Vinci was a fan of the golden ratio so it may not be a surprise that the Mona Lisa was deliberately painted this way.

But what of the hidden meanings? Look hard enough (and we mean with a powerful microscope) and you may just see some letters and numbers in Mona Lisa’s eyes. Specifically, the right eye contains the letters ‘LV’ - the painter’s signature. In the left eye, experts claim the letters CE or B are hidden, while the number 72 sits in the arch of the bridge in the background. However, while these have been discovered in the centuries of study that followed the public airing of the painting, no one has the definitive answers as to what they actually mean…